A ›hub‹ is a small device that connects computers to a local network. In 1986 a group of six musicians named themselves after this inconspicuous piece of technology. The existence of the Internet was known only to experts then, and not even those could foresee the significance it would one day have. The six musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area sensed a creative potential in the idea of letting their musical instruments talk to each other.

John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Tim Perkis, Mark Trayle, Phil Stone and Scot Gresham-Lancaster took inspiration from their environment: the music of Harry Partch and John Cage taught them the composer's self-image as one who builds his own instruments; they found in David Tudor and Gordon Mumm the understanding of electronics not only as a tool, but as a musical actor that causes irritation and unwanted finds; the contumaciousness of their sounds and structures is the expression of an anti-consumptionist counter-culture.

But The Hub was not the beginning. What The Hub did with the first regular desktop computers had previously been done by the League of Automatic Music Composers with self-soldered circuit boards and rudimentary precursors of the PC, such as the KIM-1 in 1976. Jim Horton infected Rich Gold and later Hub co-founders Tim Perkis and John Bischoff with his fascination for a ›silicon orchestra‹ that develops a life of its own and connects with people. Tables full of homemade and tricky wired electronics were not an instrument for the League, but an artificial, non-human part of the ›band‹. The Hub transformed this largely analogue approach into the digital age.

How much an art is deadlocked, how much it overlooks and how much bigger its universe could actually be, can only be seen when someone comes along who thinks it differently from the skratch. The Hub does that, for example, with a piece like »Minister of Pitch«. While in our understanding of music every musician plays a certain instrument, e.g. the bass line, the main melody, the drums, in this piece every musician is responsible for one aspect of all instruments: one for the timbre, one for the timing, and another, the »Minister of Pitch«, for the pitch. It goes without saying that such music sounds unusual.

Music, however, has not only an aesthetic dimension, but also always a political, social one. The Hub uses rules, but not superordinate scores. The hierarchy between the musicians is flat, or power is passed on, as in a democracy. The French economist and philosopher Jacques Attali certifies that music is the art form that can test new social and political models most quickly, long before they are elaborately implemented in society.

The Hub do this when they build systems that do not have superordinate control structures and in which power is distributed - quite contrary to the tendency of European art music, in which the power of composer and conductor has expanded more and more over the centuries. What happens in music when we introduce such other rules? What happens when we connect the net ever more closely to our body, our perception and our society? The Hub music has been a testbed for such musical and social issues for over 30 years.

– Author: Golo Föllmer